Over 50% of travelers use videos to help them choose a destination. Adding videos to your website can increase the time spent on each page and direct bookings. But how can hotels do it properly?
Forge Apollo’s team of Emmy® award-winning hotel marketing video producers and Webby-honored website designers know how videos and websites work hand-in-hand. By the end of this post, you’ll know:
- The types of videos to use on your hotel’s website
- The types of imagery videos should include
- How to use videos without sacrificing website performance
- Where to get started based on your hotel type
- How to tell if your website videos are working
4 Types of Video Your Hotel Website Needs
Forge Apollo works with everything from single-location boutique hotels to regional resort brands and global chains, and these four video types are consistent, high-impact assets.
We think of videos as either a hero or a helper. The hero videos have an emotional impact, while the helper videos move guests closer to booking.
Bonus: We’ve helped hotels maximize video shoot ROI by repurposing footage from the following videos into social posts and ads.
1. Banner Videos: Quickly Introduce Your Brand
Banner videos go at the top of a website page, also known as the “banner” section. Using a video in this section grabs attention and easily sets the tone for the rest of your website.
An effective banner video is:
- High-quality – Use professional imagery and editing.
- Short – Keep it under 30 seconds to hold attention.
- Seamlessly Looping – Smoothly transition when looping the video to avoid jarring the viewer.
- Silent – Avoid background music or voiceovers since this will automatically play on your page.
- Instantly Engaging – A strong visual hook should grab your users’ attention.
For example, this banner video for Mahalo Cape May gives a comprehensive overview of the hotel at a glance. Updating this banner video increased the page’s engagement rate by over 40% and the engaged time by over 50% in two months.
2. Room Tours: Reduce Doubt to Increase Bookings
When planning website video marketing for hotels, room tours should be towards the top of your list. Room tours allow potential guests to evaluate accommodations and envision themselves in your space.
Use room tour videos on individual room pages alongside room photography.
For example, ICONA Diamond Beach showcases its Premium Northside King ADA-accessible room in this tour video.
3. Brand Overview: Sell Your Story, Not Just Rooms
When introducing a new offering or subset of your hotel brand, a brand overview video can seamlessly educate travelers.
Ensure the video highlights the brand’s or offer’s key value propositions.
For example, Hilton used this video as an introduction to its Enclave resorts on its landing page.
4. FAQ Videos: Cut Down Calls and Questions
Some frequently asked questions are easier to answer than others. A video can help when a visual or auditory response better suits the question.
Imagery to Include in Hotel Website Videos
What imagery should marketers include in their hotel marketing videos? A mix of the following will give guests a complete picture.
- Lifestyle imagery – Show people who embody your target audience enjoying your hotel to help guests imagine themselves there.
- Scenic views – If your hotel is in a scenic area, show it off! This not only entices guests but also establishes your location.
- Property and amenity imagery – Most importantly, showcase your hotel’s offerings so guests understand what they will experience during their stay.
In this banner video, Forge Apollo used a mixture of lifestyle, scenic, property, and amenity imagery to set the stage for ICONA Resorts.
How to Use Website Videos Without Harming Performance
Technical performance and accessibility are vital for hotel websites. As a Philadelphia-based hotel website design agency, our website team’s stance is simple: design should always balance with performance.
Our Senior WordPress Developer, Jason Marshall, explains that to minimize the impact on performance when adding videos to a website, hotels should “embed via a third-party service like YouTube and Vimeo” to offload the video’s bandwidth usage from your server. He adds that hotels can “combine this with lazy loading the embedded videos so they are only loaded once they are visible on the page.”
When considering accessibility, hotels can learn more from our ADA website compliance guide.
Where to Start Based on Your Hotel Type
For some properties, a well-planned shoot for a banner and a few room tours is a great starting point. Larger brands may invest in a full library of videos, but you don’t have to do everything at once.
- Single-location hotels: Start with a strong banner video and one to two key room or amenity tours.
- Regional brands: Create a banner video and a small set of standardized room/amenity tours for each property, then add one brand overview for the collection.
- Large chains: Standardize video types using templates and brand guidelines, then roll them out by region or revenue priority.
For multi-property brands, we often create a repeatable shot list and style guide so each property’s videos feel consistent, while still highlighting what makes each location unique.
How to Tell if Your Website Videos are Working
We’ve found that monitoring hotel marketing video performance on websites comes down to two factors:
- Engagement – Users’ engagement rate and time on pages with the video
- Bookings – The conversion rate and booking revenue of each page with a video before and after launching the video
Hotel Marketing Videos and Websites from One, Philadelphia-Based Team
When creating hotel marketing videos for your website, it’s helpful to work with an agency that has experience with both aspects. Unlike other travel video production companies, Forge Apollo also offers website development in Philadelphia. Our combined efforts optimize your videos and website to work together to drive bookings.
We serve clients everywhere, from those in the Philadelphia region to international resorts. Reach out to schedule a strategy call where we can identify where you need video in your website funnel.
